Understanding your data (Part 1)

The problem isn’t data, it’s understanding what it means.

Data is a word that’s used again and again these days, big data, using data to make decisions, data driven design. But with the tools available today, getting data about your company is relatively trivial – the real question is what is that data actually telling you?

What do I know?

Facebook recently updated the data they offer companies (Facebook Insights) and the service is looking better than ever. There are graphs and information on your reach and demographics.

This is great, all of this information is interesting, but simply knowing it isn’t enough unless you understand what it’s telling you. We’ve designed EzyInsights to complement the stats Facebook offers – and importantly, tell you what to do from it.

Actionable insights.

Let’s take some examples direct from our tool.

We looked at the data from Radioshack from the last month and found the following things:

They post twice a day (Great)

They had 49.3 comments and 50.1 shares per post on average.

They have an Engagement Percentage Average of 0.03% (This is poor, we would expect this brand to be aiming for ~0.5%)

Here are their top 5 posts in the period ordered by comments (excluding one competition post):

In terms of conversation, the following post was their most popular in the last month:

This post had 227 comments, 3 shares and 402 likes. We can start to break down why this particular post was popular.

Does it adhere to the 3 basic tenets of making a decent Facebook post?

1. An attractive image2. Concise caption – possibly with a direct question (the legendary call to action)3. Content that is relevant to the audience

Well as you can see with this post – there is no image at all.

But the text in the post is extremely concise and is a question asked directly of the audience. Is it relevant to the community? In this case, absolutely yes. RadioShack’s community commented on this post more than any other in the last month, and the message is clear – Laptops are the winner.

Sharing=Curation

The post is a good example of content that is engaging within the community – but looking at the shares (only 3!) tells us that barely anyone felt this would be relevant to their own personal social media networks. Also the lack of an interesting image reduces shareability.

As people become more experienced using Social Media, they realise that what they share reflects them, becoming more discerning about the messages they choose to amplify. Everyone has become a content curator. This is why an engaging post isn’t necessarily a shareable post.

Join us for Part 2 soon where we’ll look at specific posts and what makes them ‘shareable’.